Sends Us This Fascinating Account of Her Time at High Storrs

Kathryn Dodd, nee Jones, (1961-68) sends us this fascinating account of her time at High Storrs: “I wrote this piece on my experiences at High Storrs as part of a bigger piece on the socio-psychological effects of upward „social mobility‟ on individuals who experience it. I was a working-class child from Pitsmoor, Sheffield and passed the 11 plus. I attended High Storrs Grammar for seven years and went on to do Sociology and Politics at university. I became an academic, specialising in medical sociology, and researched and taught at Leicester University, Coventry University, the Thomas Coram Research Unit and Thames Valley University. The section on High Storrs is not happy or celebratory and I hope readers do not find it too negative. It was my experience and I write the story as I remember it. I would be happy for comments and corrections. My memory for names is appalling so any gaps you can fill would be welcomed.” I had to get up at seven o’clock to arrive at school for ten to nine, so I couldn’t fit with my family’s usual routine. My dad got me up early at first, but after a few weeks I didn’t bother him and got off to school on my own. Later, when my brothers and sisters started secondary school, I took over making breakfast for them, so mum and dad could sleep in. A regular saucepan of porridge got us started and was followed up with egg and beans, or bacon sandwiches, or a boiled egg and bread fingers. I liked ringing the changes. Luckily, Susan Burns, my best friend from Pyebank junior school in Pitsmoor, had passed the 11 plus and got into High Storrs, so every morning I would walk up to her house on Catherine Street to call on her. I got worried if she wasn’t ready and would have been mortified if we’d been late for school. We’d hurry down the hill, onto Burngreave Road and get a 75 bus into town, with our over-sized satchels difficult to handle as we invariably had to stand up. At least we got a free school bus pass, though it was a palaver when you lost it, which you always did, at least once in the year. You had to brave the frowns of the clerks at the Barkers Pool municipal offices to replace it. I liked Sheffield buses with their cream and navy livery and I thought they were an improvement on the old trams which stopped running in 1960, the year before I started at secondary school. I liked the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’. A short walk from the 75 to the 82 bus-stop took us through the new bit of the city centre, reconstructed after the heavy bombing in 1940 and 1942 around Fitzalan Square. The raised municipal flower beds on the wide pavements, the new glass and concrete shops, (C&A, Walsh’s, Peter Robinson’s, the Brightside and Carbrook Co-operative store), were in sharp contrast to the rather grand, but blackened Gas Company building further down Commercial Street and the even grander GPO round the corner in the Square. The new buildings always lifted my spirits. If the 75 bus brought me from the grimy nineteenth-century industrial landscape of my neighbourhood in Pitsmoor, to the new 60s city centre, the 82 bus took me from one world (the poor east side of Sheffield adjacent to all the steel works in the Don Valley) to the much more affluent west of Sheffield. From the start of the nineteenth century, large stone mansions were built there: the first Crescent was laid out in 1824 in Endcliffe Park; Kenwood Park Road was much more ambitious with its laid- out estates, and houses in the Tudor, classical or gothic styles, with their libraries, conservatories, and ten foot walls round the acres of gardens to maintain their privacy; the stone houses of Broomhall, followed with Collegiate Crescent at its heart, with their four lodges manning the gates to control who got in and out of this ‘rural’ idyll, an early example of a gated community for the rich. But none of this up-market development was known to me, as the 82 bus took us up Ecclesall Road where newer, twentieth-century housing had been built. Even though, these modern houses were a revelation to Susan and I, with their gardens and trees and long paths leading to the front door. We never used our front doors, approaching the house through a passage at the side, leading to the yard and to the back kitchen. So we were being taken into a foreign country. The terminus was at the top of Carterknowle Road, with the Derbyshire hills visible in the distance, but we still had a long walk up the hill to the school gates, over an hour’s journey in all. It was a long way to travel when you were eleven and not just geographically - the psychological adjustment was even trickier. High Storrs Grammar School, built in 1933, was a replacement and enlargement of the senior Central School in Leopold Street, in Sheffield’s town centre. There was a great tradition of public education in Sheffield: initial drawings for the Central Schools development were immediately produced following the Education Act of 1870. The new replacement school sixty years later was a suitably modern building in the long, pared-down style of the thirties. On the left, looking from the road, was the boys’ school, to the right the girls’: two uniforms, two head-teachers, two timetables and two leaving times. The girls’ entrance led straight down a long dark corridor with the cloakrooms behind wood and glass to the left, in which there were rows of long benches with shoe cages below and hooks above. In the first term, I felt safe in two places in the school – in those lovely, dark cloakrooms with all the coats hanging close together so you couldn’t be seen, and in the toilets where there was complete escape. Everywhere else I felt frightened and exposed. The first terrible shock was on the first day: I was split up from Susan, my only friend from primary school. Names were called out in the hall for each class – S, T, P, and (F?). We lined up accordingly, me in 1S and Susan in 1P. In a selective grammar school, which had already scooped up the brightest 25% of the age group, we apparently needed banding into four ability levels according to our 11 plus results. Apparently, Grammar schools were expected to sort their pupils into the top set (destined for university if you were a boy, and teacher training college if you were a girl), the middle set to provide recruits for middle management and the civil service, and the bottom set for those expected to leave school at sixteen and become white collar workers. It was very difficult to move from band to band once you were allocated, so your future life was pretty much sealed, for the second time, at eleven. True to form, Susan left school at sixteen and got a job as a bank clerk in Sheffield and I stayed on and went on to university. The corridors with class-rooms off to one side were arranged around a garden with French windows which you couldn’t enter. It introduced an airiness to the architecture and of course brought light into the centre of the building, something completely lost on me at the time. The rural feel of the school extended to the beautiful views from the classrooms at the back, with large sports fields stretching out to the woods in one direction, and to the Derbyshire hills in the other. On the first day, we were led to a form room, where each girl was given a single desk (a wooden and iron all-in-one with a seat and desk with a lid) and a high pile of text-books all neatly presented and tied with string to keep everything in place. We were told that these were precious and that we were individually responsible for covering all our books, keeping them in good order and then stringing them together, and passing them on to the next girl when it came to the end of the school year. Of course, finding such a lot of book covering material was not easy in our house, and after a great deal of anxiety ended up with books covered in a variety of wallpapers. But I was proud to have so many books for myself: I was used to borrowing books from the local library but no-one in the family could afford to buy books and there were none in the home. Once I’d got used to the idea that I didn’t know anyone in my new class, I started wondering who was going to be my friend? I’m not sure how the few working-class girls in the class found each other, but I stuck to one all the way through school, even doing the same A levels as her. Jacqueline Turner’s dad was a crane driver and she lived on the Manor Estate, where my auntie Lily, Uncle Sam, and cousins Susan and Christopher also lived. Eleven thousand people were housed in these modest, semi-detached council houses to the north-east, which re-housed the first generation of working-class people in the twenties and thirties from the worst housing in the city.

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